Movie review.

Soft Focus

Lush Camera Shots Smother Hard Edge Of `Postcards'

August 20, 1995|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune Movie Critic.

Steve McLean's "Postcards From America" is a dreamlike, impressionistic movie portrait of the life and hard times of a gay hustler. And it's done in such a super-romantic style, with meltingly soft shots of desert landscapes and urban jungles, that you can almost spot it as the work of a foreign filmmaker.

Which it is. McLean, a Britisher best known for his music videos with Scottish pop singer-composer Jimmy Somerville, tells an edgy tale full of brutality and despair, but his camera caresses everything.

That caress tends to smother the story, which is based on the memoirs of artist-writer David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992. The movie's David (played by three actors: "Poison's" Jim Lyons as the adult Dave and brothers Olmo and Michael Tighe as child and teenager) is an abused New Jersey kid, son of a violent father and a victimized mother, who slides into delinquency on New York's streets.

McLean shows us David at three stages of his life. But all the parts, intertwined by the movie's back-and-forth chronological structure, keep him in a fancy trance of angst. David's dad beats him. David's lovers beat him. He and his friends try to rob their johns. It's an endless chain of violence, enlivened by outbursts of psychopathology and swoons of desire.

David half-floats through a landscape swarming with threats and death. And though his world has a link to the city-and-desert America Jack Kerouac evoked in "On the Road," the movie lacks Kerouac's humor and ecstatic depth.

It's a waste rather than a wasteland. The real-life Wojnarowicz, who hustled in Times Square while attending Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, is an outlaw artist figure in the line of Rimbaud, Genet and Kerouac's Beats. But the movie, puzzlingly, focuses on his outlaw side and his sexuality, rather than his art.

The cinematography by Ellen Kuras ("Swoon") is lyrical, the writing chaotic, the acting too languid or mannered, with the exception of Michael Imperioli, who heists the whole movie in the supporting role of David's smirking hustler buddy. Maybe the title itself is a giveaway. Wojnarowicz called his memoir "Close to the Knives." Why change that to the touristy-sounding "Postcards From America"?

Writer-director Elaine Proctor's "Friends"--which started a one-week run Friday at Facets Multimedia--is a fascinating, bold and inclusive look at recent South African history. It is a portrait of apartheid's last years, seen through the eyes of three girlfriends from varying backgrounds who share a house in the Johannesburg suburb of Troyeville, before being torn apart in the conflict. The movie may be stronger in its parts than on the whole, but the best sections have a blazing urgency and passion. And "Friends" boasts a thrilling performance by one of the world's great young actresses, New Zealander Kerry Fox.

Fox, who played disturbed novelist Janet Frame in Jane Campion's best film, "An Angel at My Table" (1992), looks a bit like Bridget Fonda. And when she's cooking, she has the fearless drive and naked honesty of her nonpareil Australian predecessor, Judy Davis. Playing the key role of Sophie, Fox tears us up, just as Davis did in "High Tide." Sophie is a privileged white South African who becomes involved with some African National Congress bombings. And Fox gives us every pulse and moment of her descent, anxiety, anguish.

As Sophie's girlfriends and roommates, the steady African Thoko and the skittish Afrikaner Aninka, Dambisa Kente and Michele Burgers are both fine, even if they lack the bravura opportunities Kerry Fox has. The film itself has a crushing intensity in many individual scenes, but the overall effect seems muddied, the cinematography too dark. There's a power here that usually ignites only when Fox is on screen. Fortunately, that's almost enough.